Fincher’s Network a Social Revolution
Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is a student at Harvard University in 2003. He has just been dumped by his girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara). With the help of his best friend, maybe his only friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) he hacks into the College’s computer network and creates a sight allowing students to judge female students one against the other based entirely upon their looks. Within a few hours, the website he sets up to this crashes the entire Harvard network.
Andrew Garfield and Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network © Columbia Pictures
This is only the beginning. Cameron Winklevoss (Armie Hammer), his twin brother Tyler (Josh Pence) and their good friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) have an idea to create an exclusive place on the internet for those most deserving at the school.
Leading them on, Mark doesn’t believe their idea is big enough. With Eduardo’s help, he goes to create a site everyone at Harvard can be a part of. From there, he expands to college campuses across the United States. Next he’s taken his idea across the pond to prestigious universities in Europe. Soon he’s hobnobbing with Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) and moving his operations to California. Mark is one his way to becoming a billionaire. He has created Facebook and it is a monstrous success.
How much is fact and how much is fiction about director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network, an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s best-selling and controversial book The Accidental Billionaires, doesn’t really matter. What the pair have attempted is to construct a high-octane character study of selfish genius, an intellectual foray into the mind of a man full of great ideas that would ultimately change the world (for better or for worse I’ll leave to you) but completely without the social skills to share his newfound largesse with anyone other than himself. He’s Charles Foster Kane for the internet millennium, his Rosebud a community of “friends” all chatting, talking and relating to one another while he sits quietly on the sidelines friendless and alone.
At least, that’s the depiction of him found in this particular movie, and it is one thanks to Fincher’s superb handling of his actors and to Sorkin’s whip-smart dialogue that is both believable and emotionally palpable. The whole thing plays like a modern day merging of His Girl Friday, Citizen Kane, The Hospital and of all things the director’s own Zodiac. It is a procedural masking as a drama, the filmmakers diving into the heart of creation and attempting the ferret out the idiosyncratic cranial cylinders that make it possible. We celebrate genius even though to create something extraordinary and different those who have it tend to be a little bit off their rocker and somewhat narcissistic, their Zuckerberg no different on both of those fronts.
But that doesn’t make their examination of him one-sided. No matter what a person’s opinion of Mezrich’s book, Fincher and Sorkin’s Zuckerberg is a madman and an egotist but he’s also one unsure of how to facilitate human connection. For all his cyber wizardry relating to people on a personal level is alien to him and he just can’t understand why everyone just doesn’t realize what he’s created is revolutionary and then get one with their lives. He can’t understand why they would question that Facebook was his baby, can’t seem to be able to process that others would want credit for helping him spawn the ideas that would lead to its success.
More than that, he doesn’t seem to be able to be thankful for the good things in his life that he already has. Eduarado is his friend, and for whatever reason he trusts Mark and keeps trying to believe he has the best interests of both him and the company they’ve created at heart. Maybe he wasn’t ready to be CFO of a business this revolutionary and ahead of its time. Maybe he wasn’t the right guy to help blossom its cybernetic flower into a something that would continue to multiply and grow. But he was the guy who stood up in the beginning and believed in Zuckerberg’s ideas, fighting tooth and nail to make them a reality, and when betrayal ultimately comes he’s not so much blindsided by it as he is disappointed.
It almost goes without saying that this is Eisenberg’s best performance to date, but it is one where the dialogue is delivered with such razor-sharp speed and with almost continually monotone emotion it is also one I fear people want give enough credit to. Unlike The Squid and the Whale, Adventureland or Zombieland he is mining corners and crevices he’s never traveled to before, and while his work in Holy Rollers hinted he was ready to breakout into unexplored territories that doesn’t mean I was ready for this. Eisenberg goes for broke, unafraid to craft a character audiences might downright loathe, in the process making Zuckerberg a pitiable if fearless madman I could actually somewhat relate to.
The rest of the cast is fine, most of the time better than that, but I can’t really say they broke it in ways that caught me off guard or anything. I will say that Timberlake will get a heck of a lot of mostly deserved praise, but as good as he still isn’t the one I find myself thinking about a few days after watching the movie. No, he and all the rest are just window dressing as far as I’m concerned, and as Zuckerberg is the center of the movie Eisenberg is the one who still remains equally in the center of my thoughts.
The director crafts a document that analyzes who we are now and where we’re at in a way no other motion picture (maybe Catfish could be included here, and if the two could be paired as a double feature the resulting impact might just be revolutionary) up to now has, and for that reason alone that probable makes the film a masterpiece. But I will say that as brilliant as I feel this picture is I didn’t walk out of it as jazzed or as amazed as I did out of Fincher’s Zodiac, a picture that blew me away – and continues to do so – right from the very get-go. Unlike that one The Social Network has in many ways snuck up on me, and like all great films the fact I keep marinating on all its nuances and intricacies is testament enough to its potential long-lasting import.
Film Rating: êêêê (out of 4)
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